At Berkeley

"At Berkeley" is a documentary by the legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman ("Welfare") that attempts to convey a sense of daily life at a public university. Wiseman shows the people who make the massive organism work, not just students and professors, but also administrators and laborers, and over the course of the massive four-hour running time some of the flavor and diversity of their activity is conveyed - from poetry analysis to robotics.

Made at a time when the university was struggling with severe budget cuts, "At Berkeley" affirms the value of UC Berkeley and of public education, in general. In its uninflected, almost deadpan way, it celebrates the hard work of individuals, from the chancellor to the guy who cuts the grass, all of whom work hard and care. These people are admirable, and so is the intent of the film.

However, a film is not just about intent. It is also an experience, and this is where "At Berkeley" becomes an iffy proposition. Those four long hours have few rewards. It's not that "At Berkeley" could be called boring in the torturous way that bad movies are sometimes boring. Rather, it's dull in the precise way that life can be dull. To watch it is like sitting in on a staff meeting, listening to people talk on and on and on. Professors are used to talking nonstop, and in a few cases in "At Berkeley" it's rather astonishing to hear them repeating the same ideas over and over, instead of just coming to a point and stopping.

The film's main cinematic bright light is then-Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who at least is cheerful and gets off a few good lines. What might be called the comic highlight of the film comes when Birgeneau looks at the demands of student protesters with the bemused contempt of the professional for the amateur: Back when he was a student protester, he knew to confine his demands to one or two things, maybe three at most - not a whole page of contradictory items.

Some scenes are more congenial than others. It's nice to see Robert Reich lecturing on how to administer an organization, for example. For the most part, the classroom scenes hold more interest than the committee discussions, and yet nothing in the film seems truly spontaneous or even unexpected. Wiseman films people talking, and the conversations are rational, civilized and self-conscious.

If you've seen Wiseman's other films, such as "Welfare" (1975), about the welfare system, or "Titicut Follies" (1967), about an institution for the criminally insane, you know that Wiseman's fly-on-the-wall style can produce extraordinary results. He keeps filming, until his subjects get so used to him that they stop playing to the camera and start revealing themselves. But in "At Berkeley" there is not a single scene, not even a single moment, to make any viewer wonder, "How did he get that? How is it even possible that the people let that be filmed?" Instead, it's a film of surfaces and public personae, a mile wide and an inch thick.

Still, it's some kind of record and may be of value to people in the future. Two hundred years from now, if someone wants to know what people really sounded and acted like in Northern California in the 21st century - and what it was like to sit in a committee room or in a classroom with them - "At Berkeley" will be the ultimate resource.